"home"

i’m going “home,” but that’s not my home. what even is home? is it the four walls i drive to and close around myself every night, or something that lives deeper, in the pulse of the world?

i think of home as the café on the corner, the one where i sit and watch cars pass and people chat. i sonder, feeling their lives brush against mine in invisible threads. they rest their minds, escape into little worlds of their own, and in that space, i can think of everything and nothing all at once.

sometimes, home feels like the highway i take late at night. the road stretches endlessly, yellow-tinted streetlights fading behind me, while music repeats through my speakers, and for a moment, i breathe. i drive to clear my head, following the invisible currents of the night, guiding me back to the place i’m supposed to rest. but when i arrive, the welcome feels cold and stale. the embrace of “home” is malnourished and sickly—the air hostile, sharp against the back of my nose. like fluorescent lights and blank whiteboards in a classroom, a space that should still my thoughts but instead sends them racing—both a thousand miles and nowhere at all. “home” becomes the place where i spiral, searching in the void for a reset button that doesn’t exist.

and yet, i find home in other places. in the loud silence my sister offers when she knows there are no words, only shared pain. in my lover’s arms; in the vast blue ocean of his eyes, the softness of his curls, the curve of his smile. i see it in the wildflowers he brings me when we drive to the beach. i feel it at the beach in the soft pull of the waves, in the salt air whispering secrets of the universe, in the warm smile of the sun, and the quiet blessings the moon bestows upon me as it traces its path across the sky. in these moments, the world bends gently around me, and i am held.

they say your heart will always find its way back home. but what happens when your body arrives “there,” and your heart refuses to follow?

sometimes, i think my heart already knows. i feel it in the unborn child who lives only in my heart—the one who fills my mind with memories that haven’t happened yet: their laugh, their eyes, the person they will one day become. in that imagined love, i feel a quiet belonging, a sacred space where home is no longer uncertain, but waiting, shimmering softly like the horizon before dawn.